Community Informatics, also known as community networking, electronic community networking, community-based technologies or community technology refers to an emerging set of principles and practices concerned with the use of Information and Communications Technologies for personal, social, cultural or economic development within communities, for enabling the achievement of collaboratively determined community goals, and for invigorating and empowering communities in relation to their larger social, economic, cultural and political environments.

As an academic discipline Community Informatics can be seen as a field of practice in applied Information and Communications Technology (ICT). It brings together the practices of community development and organization, and insights from fields such as sociology, planning, development studies, women's studies, library and information sciences, management information systems, and management sciences. Its outcomes -- community networks and community-based ICT-enabled service applications -- are of increasing interest to grassroots organizations, NGOs and civil society, governments, the private sector, and multi-lateral agencies, among others. Self-organized community initiatives of all varieties, from different countries, are concerned with ways to harness ICTs for social capital, poverty alleviation and for the empowerment of the "local" in relation to its larger economic, political and social environments. Collaborative communities help bridge organizational boundaries, ensuring more effective and efficient forms of collaboration in and between stakeholders from business, government, education, and civil society.

ICTs play a key role in enabling many types of virtual or hybrid communities. The resulting socio-technical systems, however, are very complex and continuously evolving. The intricate interactions between community requirements and their enabling technologies, however, are still ill understood. In particular, there is a huge gap between those who understand the complexities of community requirements and dynamics, and the information technologists who can build the technologies and systems that can catalyze and enable communities into more effective action.

GOALS AND TOPICS

We want to gather researchers and practitioners interested in the modeling and analysis of community requirements, the design and implementation of community based ICTs and community information systems, and the evaluation of these technologies in order to determine their effective use.

Topics of interest to this workshop include, but are not limited to:

Community requirements modeling and analysis

Enabling technologies (weblogs, discussion fora, portals, &)

Social computing

Collaborative working environments

Community ontologies

Community context modeling and meaning negotiation

Community IS development methodologies

Evaluation methods

Pragmatic Web

Mobile computing and local development

ICT4D (ICT for Development)

Community Planning and Community Technology

Locally significant broadband applications

SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS

We are looking for articles on current or recently finished research projects as well as articles from practitioners. Papers should be in the 3000 - 5000 words range and should be submitted in PDF format. Submissions must be laid out according to the final cameraready formatting instructions which can be found at:

Accepted papers will be published along with the OTM 2006 Workshop Proceedings on Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Failure to commit to presentation at the workshop automatically excludes a paper from the proceedings.